Scientists and linguists have long attempted, with the improved understanding of the nature of grammar, to develop computers that can understand and respond to human language. However, the attempts have mostly been intractable due, in part, to the meaning or semantics of language that can be ambiguous except under the most stringent constraints. In particular, the meaning of language is often subjective to each individual. Much of the meaning that one person derives from a phrase is based on her or her own experiences, interpretation of those experiences, expectations and understandings resulting from those interpretations, and the mapping of those expectations and understandings to the statement. Further, phrases are often naturally ambiguous, even under a detailed objective analysis.
The same ambiguity can be applied to phrases expressed in limited-syntax languages such as programming languages, in part because the system components that produce phrases (the “speakers”) and the consumers that access them (the “listeners”) are created by people who have their own independent ideas about how to structure or read those phrases to make them meaningful. As a result, each system component is capable of “speaking” and “understanding” only one or a few dialects of a language, but not all of the dialects, which can lead to system fragility. The effects can be seen in, for example, print workflows in which each component uses Postscript®, an industry-standard programming language available from Adobe® and others, and used to describe, to printing systems, how a printed document should look. Further, the effects can be seen in portable document format (PDF) workflows, and in other computing systems. The effects can add cost, bugs, and complexity to computing systems.
Therefore, it may be desirable to have systems and methods for improving system performance by reducing fragility of computing systems. In particular, it may be desirable to have systems and methods for reducing ambiguities in language semantics among computing system components.